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Sunday, 14 July 2013

RACISM IN AMERICAN JUSTICE: THE ZIMMERMAN CASE

A Florida jury found George Zimmerman, the white male who killed an unarmed black teenager Trayvon
Martin. What if the exact same jury and judge had a case before them where the defendant was the young black teenager Martin and the victim was Zimmerman. Would a black defendant even go up on charges of second degree murder, or would he be faced with first degree because skin color is a sign of a guilty individual.One would think that even if the accused were on trial for deliberately running over a cat, a jury would have given him at least a couple of months in jail. In the state Florida, intentional cruelty to animals is punished by a fine of $10,000 and up to five years in prison. Is the life of a human being not worth that of an animal?

It is not just the US watching the trial, but the entire world to see if indeed the American system of justice has changed since the 1960s when KKK members could not be found guilty because no jury would convict them. Racism remains blatant at the core of American society and the judicial system is one manifestation of it.

The following citation offers a synopsis that many people know about the racist nature of the American justice system. "Blacks, who are 2.6% of the U.S. population, currently account for 38.9% of all violent crime arrests nationwide—including
32.5%
of all rapes, 55.5%
of all robberies, and 33.9% of all aggravated assaults. (Further,
blacks are 29.8% of all property-crime arrestees.) ... because of racism, white
defendants are not only acquitted more regularly than their black
counterparts, but are treated more leniently even in cases where they
are found guilty. Such disparate treatment, says the left, explains
why, as
of December 31, 2010, blacks (2.6% of the U.S. population) constituted fully 37.9% of all prisoners
under state and federal jurisdiction—whereas
non-Hispanic whites, (64%
of the population) were just 32.2% of prisoners, and Hispanics (16%
of the population) were 22.3% of prisoners. While black males were incarcerated at a rate of 3,074 per 100,000, the corresponding
rates for white and Hispanic males were 459 and 1,258 per 100,000,
respectively. I will not go into the statistics showing that American prisons are filled with blacks, nor will I mention that 84% of blacks feel the entire justice system, from the cop on the beat to the supreme court, is racist to the core and the evidence is in the results of who winds up in prison and who is acquitted." Source: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1627

One of the ironies in the American justice system and society at large is that it has made monumental efforts to conceal racism behind the official policy of "political correctness". While it is a socially just to behave in a non-racist manner in society, whether one is a private business, a school, local government, or an individual, all evidence is that political correctness has been but a very thin veneer behind which rests racism. What difference does it make to me if I am a black man looking for work to have a white personnel manager smile and say the right things to me, if in the end the action of the company's hiring policies will speak louder than its political correctness attitude? What difference does it make that the "political correctness" language is used as a communications tactic, when in essence the result is the continuance of the racial divide? Why should I care that white people are "politically correct" with me in their outward behavior, but in essence the institutional structure is stacked against me? Do I care that a politician says all the right things that a multicultural society wants to hear, but votes for policies that advance the wealthy who are invariably of the majority race while voting to lower living standards and social safety net for the poor, among them mostly blacks? When a society has institutionalized "political correctness", it has done so precisely because it has not dealt substantively with issues of racial and social justice.

A society that has a racist justice system is racist, no matter how much it tries to conceal its racism with affirmative action legislation and even electing a black president who is committed in maintaining the white elitist racist system of justice. What moral authority does the US have to preach to the rest of the world about democracy and freedom, of pluralism and human rights when it is practicing racism, even in blatant cases of murder? What moral authority does the US have to speak of an open and just society that it wishes to promote around the world when its own society is socially unjust more so than those to whom the US is preaching around the world? What does it mean to have a black president in America but a system of justice rooted in racism? Is this the new more stealthy face of American racism, or is it merely a continuation of a culture immersed in apartheid mindset from which it refuses to escape because it is always convenient to have minorities as scapegoats for all the problems that the elites cause for society.

It is amazing that some conservatives have tried to make the Zimmerman trial into a gun rights issue, a liberal vs. conservative, as though the struggle against racism is a matter for those favoring gun control. This is a manifestation of the mass psychosis of racism that prevails American society to such a degree that the essence of the murder trial becomes trivialized and lost in a "gun control issue". Five decades after the Civil Rights movement some things have changed. However, deep down in the underbelly of American society, racism is alive and well, concealed behind all sorts of liberal and conservative issues.

My response to comments on LINKEDIN:If
only it were the judges that were the problem with the system, then
something could be done and fairly quickly. The society itself in its
many complex phases from pro-gun activists finding institutional
backing, to those hiding behind "law-and-order" rhetoric and others
arguing that terrorism is looming just around the corner, the climate is
one of a quasi-police state where minorities are an easy target for the
entire justice system. America has remnants of the pre-civil rights
society, now under the veil of combating crime and terrorism and the
presumption of guilt based on skin color.

It is important for people differing to try and understand not just the words but the intention behind the worlds, as Ludwig Wittgenstein correctly argued in his philosophy of language. Having said that, it is important to understand that what makes us human is compassion for all creatures, especially our fellow human beings regardless of skin color or any other external trait that has absolutely nothing to do with the innate traits of that person. The capacity to see things from the perspective of the victim in a society that discriminates is a measure of compassionate. In all honesty, those who lack such compassion may themselves have never been on the receiving end, or they may have overwhelming fears of losing their identity by accepting others who appear different on the outside, but in essence are us, or it may be a case of a bad experience, etc. Whatever it is, the species has a single origin and it is important we value our own species, instead of seeking to undermine, denigrate, or do away with some within that species so we can feel the illusion of godlike.

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